Born to Die

Alone. Yes. Alone with the cats.

He lit a cigarette, and smoked it thoughtlessly before leaving it half done in the saucer. It slowly smoked away, turning itself into dark grey crumbs.

Yes. And perhaps he was tired. The light outside darkened to fill the room with an uneasy blue. The orange cat jumped on his lap, meowing and purring, rubbing her face against his.

He kissed her head, pecking it with his lips, as she snorted with pleasure.

And now, when these old feelings strike, and when he sees her naked body in his mind’s eye. Bare and perfect, soft and rounded and perfect; he can’t bare it.

He plucks up the kitty and drops her lightly to the threadbare carpet. He walks to the phone, and dials her number, fingers pausing over numbers, and heart choking each breath, each deep sigh.

  It had been her through the window, crying, tearstained, ramming her fist again and again into his peeling front door.

Her with the red hair, waistlength. But he’d seen her last week, getting off the bus outside the supermarket, and she’d chopped it all off.

‘You’ve reached Charlotte, leave me a message, and maybe I’ll call you back…’

The phone beeps, and he hears himself breathing into her voicemail.

                                     

She is a fragile bird, small and always on the sturdy side of plump, but lately she’s been looking so frail,

 so drained. She doesn’t eat much, just sits up late, and tries with an energy that is surely ebbing, to watch films, and get enough sleep, and get to work on time each morning.

It is the sight of her legs reflected in the mirror each and every morning, like milk, blinding – they make her shut her eyes/open/again.

She’s nothing if she’s not human. But you’d never know her grandmother was Chinese. You’d never know her father was a burnished Spaniard. You’d never know she has a graduate degree. You’d never know about the sad times, curled foetus-like and emptying slowly, her tears, into sleepless darkness. Each and every morning.

She drinks her coffee. She doesn’t drink it every day. She sometimes forgets to.

It makes her feel jittery and extreme. Even if it’s unleaded she might be up till 2 or 3am, writing frantic poetry on those blinding thighs. So white, almost porcelain, except for the popped blue and purple spider veins that stretch below the surface.

‘I want to be whole.’ She writes.

‘I want to be excused from this room of sadness, where the others nod, unnoticing and quiet.

Silently. I will leave.’

She’ll have to wear jeans tomorrow to cover her tracks. She’ll shower them off, those sparse characters, despised, in the shower tomorrow evening.

Normally she rides her bike to work, lets her hair be billowing in cold rushes of air.

No hair now. Just orange bangs, short back and sides. The barber seemed surprised that a young woman would want her hair cut by him. But she couldn’t be fucked with the false niceties of small talk with the phoney people at the posh salon.

She’d gotten it cheaper at the barber. No chit chat. Just the drone of the horse races on the radio.

The snipsnip of his scissors. The whir of the small razor on the goosedown of her neck.

The air blasting cool and cold and stunning against her face outside.

Perhaps she’ll scream out loud, just to get the sounds out, all the trapped words.

Standing on her bike, arms outstretched, flying down the hill of a peaceful street made a riot by her strangled war cries. Wake ‘em up. All of them. Rich conservatives woken abruptly in their queen sized beds, shaking their ugly aging heads at the way the world has become.

Today she takes the bus. Waits for it to arrive, and it's on time for once.

She recognizes the busdriver, when she looked more effeminate, he used to ask her for a smile.

She used to bear her fangs at him, her eyes boring into his nicotine stained, booze fumed existence.

He, like the rest of them, doesn’t take much notice of her anymore. Now that she is invisible, anonymous, androgynous, and almost smaller than she once was.

The others, the people, all primped and tired eyed, read books, or gaze out the dirty windows at the passing scenery. She watches them instead.

And thinks about the amazing sex she could have with them. The hurried groans shared with the balding businessman. Whipping the candy blonde in the corner, flogging her within an inch of their insanity and intimacy. Placing creeping tender kisses on the thighs of the elderly Asian woman, her fruit filled basket on the floor beside her feet. The pierced and lanky young man would be clutching, crying cumming. And the trans-man by the back door would be skin tearing, skin bursting, uterine tingling passion.

 This is the most erotic moment of her day. The only erotic moment.

The rest of her time she can’t bear to think, can’t bear to be bare, can’t bear to feel any pleasure, to think thoughts –

She keeps her hands still between clenched knees in punishment, eyes open/shut/again – unseeing – pillows and the mess of blankets, unslept in.

Yes. She saw him. She doesn’t know if he knows that she saw him catching sight of her.

She caught him in her peripheries. Snared him. And walked by him without a glance, without a single admission of his atoms.

But later, in the bathrooms at work, she allowed herself a tear or two.

In the intervening and integrated days, his skin hurt, and the hours intertwined with simple agony.

The hairs on his arms prickled, as if cold, and sensitive to the touch.

Weeping inside, to the cityscapes in photographs. The strange details of maps of far distant cities – Rome, Florence, Los Angeles, Osaka.

The paw prints, the stepping in puked up hair balls first thing in the morning, their constant mewling and dangerous winding around his legs as he emptied tins into bowls for them, their all-knowing, all ignoring guardian presence.

Their sensual stink, and complete and utter trust in his big kitty arms, as he rubbed their matted bellies. It wasn’t his fault they'd yowl in protest if he tried brushing them.

Every day. In a mess of kitchen shit. Drinking too much Heineken, and smoking too many American Spirits.

It had been her, running after him up the front path, just like it had been her, naked and searing in his bed. He’d slammed the door behind him, and covered his ears to her banging at the door.

‘Brian BRIAN BRIIIIIIIIIAN brian… Brian? Brian BRIAN!! Please! Please!!’

It had been her at the window, face streaming with desperate tears and make-up, screaming silently, mouth wide and face creasing with despair –

‘Let me in’- She mouthed at him through the glass. But he hadn’t.

And it was her voice he was talking to now  – though she would hear it in another place in time.

Perhaps she’d stand on his doorstep again – his words might reach her heart through the wires, and hang their heads in shame.

Perhaps she would listen, and feel the splitting of her chest, and sit and cry in relief, and jump up again almost immediately, and rush out the door.

It would be him – him pushing his way into the caverns in her body – she would be driving him, steering him towards the overjoyment – the complete and incomplete – piecing together all that insanity, and breaking it again – again – again – again –

it would be pleasure and it would be fragrant pain. It would be day old cat food, cigarette smoke sticking to the walls. It would be small purring creatures, rubbing their lithe bodies against – and walking over –

two deathly bodies beneath the sheets, still and silent, just a pulse flickering, the wings of a hummingbird, a butterfly, swimming over the veins of one neck – a chest – beneath two pale breasts – the spider veins – like a subway map – of four sleeping wrists.

Lana Del Rey is a singer-songwriter from New York.

Born to Die is her second album, released earlier this year.

She has received both lavish praise and harsh criticism, and perhaps this reflects the extremities in her music:

A voice that soars from low blue-singing - just a half tone off flat - to girlish highs that arouse even as they soothe.

Perhaps it is the cinema sadness of her sound, like the seeping huge cities of America, that drown your hope in illusions of grandeur.

My father would call it self-indulgence, and maybe it is that - but just maybe she's great.

Her songs are anthemic, they push me through impatient hours of waiting, and the fear that arrives with the tearing away of inertia. 

She is beautiful, incredibly, like an old movie star and it could be that almost blankness of her expression that lets her carry the feelings that capture my youth, our youth - and the loss of all those simple plans and dreams - on her face.

Maybe she'll flop and fail - but maybe, just maybe - she'll become a name on a gold star, a small golden gramophone - our poor little rich girl, who is really just a kid from New York.